Blood in the water — when public officials start to turn on each other: Opinion

With Montebello Housing Development Corporation President, Robert Monzon , right, at his side, State Senator Ron Calderon holds news conference at the Bella Circle Housing development in Montebello, Friday, January 29, 2010, to announce his legislation to expand a $10, 000 housing credit for first-time home buyers. (Correspondent photo by Mike Mullen/SWCity)

The political waters in L.A. have been chummed up by assorted charges of corruption too numerous to be contained in a single sentence. And while the sharks are on their heels, now public officials are turning on each other like a bag full of angry weasels.

Under FBI corruption investigation, state Sen. Ron Calderon has found a new strategy to strike back at the collective stink eye he’s been receiving from the public and from other pols — point the finger back at them. The Los Angeles County legislator told reporters yesterday that this whole FBI investigations thing is really just payback by agents bitter he wouldn’t help them dig dirt on other senators. Which ones would be the dirty ones? Why, all of them.

Calderon named only two he claims the feds asked him to spy­ on — Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Sen. Kevin de Leon, a East Los Angeles legislator who many believe has aspirations to be the next Senate president. But Calderon’s attorney added that the feds were targeting the “entire” Senate — yes, 40 elected men and women — for corruption. That’d either be a conspiracy of a grand scale or the largest blanket investigation in political history.

Calderon, though, said he couldn’t be convinced to turn stool pigeon. He said agents asked him to wear a wiretap, but turned them down. Talk about payback, Steinberg said in an official email response to Calderon’s accusation: “This is obviously in response to the action the Rules Committee and I took to temporarily remove Senator Calderon from Senate committees.”

De Leon, meanwhile, says he’s just mystified about all these allegations. He told our reporter Dakota Smith yesterday that he doesn’t know why the feds are interested in him or why he was mentioned 17 times in the FBI affidavit fingering Calderon or why the document indicated he funneled $25,000 to a nonprofit run by Calderon’s brother.

“I don’t know where that figure comes from. I don’t know why it is attached to me because I don’t have authorization. In no form, way or shape did I intervene with that 25K. It has nothing to do with me,” de Leon told Smith.

As unlikely as it seems that an entire legislative body would be corrupt (at least one hopes ­­— prays, really — it is unlikely), there is local precedent in the tiny city of Bell, where (almost) an entire sitting body and many of its top managers were arrested and charged with various crimes associated with the looting the municipal treasury.

The trial of one of them, Angela Spaccia, the former assistant city manager of Bell, is ongoing in L.A. Superior Court at moment. In her defense, Spaccia has turned on her former colleagues left and right to make her own role in the rape of Bell seem minor.

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Earlier in the trial she painted her boss, Robert Rizzo, as the mastermind behind the pilfering (by the simple virtue of getting himself a government salary in excess of $1 million, she may be right; she was only pulling down about half that) and this week said she was disgusted by police Chief Randy Adams’ greed when he was being hired. After all, he was going to make more than both the heads of LAPD and NYPD.

If only it weren’t for her emails chortling “pigs get fat!” and explaining how she and other city officials deliberately hid their pay schedules so no one would put together just how many zeros appeared on their paychecks.

Spaccia’s emails, also carried what turned out to be a prophetic quip, “hogs get slaughtered.”